A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Saturday, July 12, 2014

BOOKS

Blogging
about the books I have been reading got me thinking about books in general,
which, as you might imagine, have played a very big role in my life.The first book of which I have a vivid memory
is the initial Dr. Seuss publication, And
To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street [which I quite mistakenly thought
referred to the Mulberry Street in Greenwich Village on which my parents lived
before Barbara and I were born, until a more knowledgeable reader of this blog corrected
my error.]But my favorite childhood
book was a fat red copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories – four novels
and fifty-six short stories in one volume.After taking it out of the Jamaica Public Library during an outing with
my father, I became so enamored of Holmes and Watson that my parents bought me
a copy the next Christmas.I actually
subscribed for a while to the journal of the Baker Street Irregulars, an
organization of adults [so to speak] named after the team of street urchins who
kept Holmes apprised of the news from the London underworld.

Like
many writers and serious readers, I have an intense sensory relationship to
certain of my books, grounded as much in their smell and look and feel as in their
contents.The stubby black-covered Selby-Bigge
edition of David Hume’s A Treatise of
Human Nature is my favorite book, as much because of its rough-textured
paper as for its splendid index [a book in its own right] and, of course, Hume’s
beautifully clear, elegantly simple statement of his world-shattering
arguments.Even though I long ago all
but committed sections of it to memory, I still like to take it down from time
to time and simply turn the pages lovingly.

The
Oxford University Press translations of the works of Aristotle, many volumes of
which I acquired second-hand for absurdly low prices while a young Instructor
at Harvard, seem to me magisterial in their authority, although I am of course
utterly incompetent to judge their scholarly accuracy.My original copy of the Kemp-Smith
translation of the Critique of Pure Reason
was a graduation gift from my undergraduate fellow madrigalists, Michael Jorrin
and Richard Eder.It is inscribed “For
Bob WolffEach even page from Michael
JorrínEach odd page from Richard
EderMay 28 1953.”The margins are filled with comments and
questions in many different inks.On
occasion, I will question a passage in one ink; then in a later ink, write “oh
yes, I see.”All these years later, I
can no longer recall my original puzzlement or my subsequent eclairecissement.I read and re-read the volume until its
covers fell off and I was forced to buy a substitute.The original, nicely re-bound, now sits on my
shelves here in Paris, a memento of my youth.

Susie
and I have a joint treasure, a collection of the poems of e. e. cummings which
we read to one another when we were courting in the late ‘40s.Since it technically was hers, I lost sight
of it for thirty-four years until we married in 1987, when it became in law as
in spirit our joint property.

As
I sit here writing this blog post, arrayed above me on the shelves of our Paris
apartment are the complete works of Marx and Engels in forty-four handsomely German
bound volumes, the product of the East German Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus.For many years, I had a standing order with Blackwell’s in Oxford.As each volume appeared, they would send it
to me and I would add it to the growing row of matching books.The last volume arrived in 1960, price
eighteen shillings. [Eighteen shillings in 1960 was roughly $36 in 2014 prices –
a decent bargain for 538 pages of letters and 130 pages of notes and indices.]The Werke
are a curious combination of Germanic scholarship and proletarian consciousness.The scholarship is impeccable, as we might
expect.But since the volumes are
officially intended for an audience of workingmen [not, perhaps, of working
women], the personenregister
identifies everyone whose name appears in the letters, including such world historical
figures as Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln, with whom a bourgeois
readership might be expected to be familiar.

I
have had some odd experiences with books, one of which occurred as Susie and I
were packing up to leave Pelham, MA seven years ago and move to Chapel Hill.Since we were moving from a big house to a
small apartment, a good deal had to go, and we decided that one of the rejecta would be the many-volumed
classic eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica that Susie had purchased when her boys were little and had
brought with her as a dowry to our marriage.Youthful readers will perhaps not understand the special role that the Britannica played in the intellectual
coming of age of America.Published in
1911, the Eleventh edition laid claim to being the assembled scholarly wisdom
of the great tradition of European letters.Many of its articles, its authors tastefully identified only with their
initials, were written by the most famous Oxbridge scholars of the time.Salesmen went door to door in rural America
peddling sets to aspiring upwardly mobile immigrant parents, eager that their children
should have access to the secret knowledge that seemed to have catapulted WASPs
into positions of wealth and power.

Amherst,
MA had a recycling center, of course, in one corner of which was a wooden shack
containing shelves of books that residents no longer wanted but were loathe
simply to throw away.One was welcome to
browse the collection and take what one wanted.Think of it as a sort of academic dumpster-diving.When I showed up with the Britannica volumes in my car trunk, the
imperious guardian of the shack informed me that I could not leave them there
since “no one will want them.”I cannot adequately
express the shame I felt that my garbage was not good enough for the town dump.Over the next week, I slunk around Amherst,
surreptitiously tossing a volume at a time into trash bins in town or on the
UMass campus.

The
life histories of the books I myself have written or edited are replete with
odd and unanticipated turns of fate.A
textbook imaginatively entitled About
Philosophy, which I wrote in the summer of 1974 for an advance big enough
to enable my first wife to finish a serious scholarly work, is now in its
fortieth year and eleventh edition, having earned fully half of all the money I
have made from my books.Since I was not
even sure Prentice-Hall would actually published it, I allowed myself to say in
it exactly what I thought about philosophy rather than what I imagined Instructors
teaching Introduction to Philosophy might wish to find in a textbook.Quite unexpectedly, that self-indulgent
approach proved appealing.The one book
for which I am widely known, In Defense
of Anarchism, started life just shy of half a century ago as a contribution
to an ill-fated, never published, volume tentatively titled The Harper Guide to Philosophy, edited
by the late Arthur Danto.Eventually
published in its present form five years after it was written, it acquired a
bizarre fame – universally read, almost universally reviled, translated into languages
as far afield as Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian.

To
an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided
many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered.I am constantly grateful to the scholars and
thinkers who have written, and continue to write, the books from which I derive
such pleasure, both the great authors of the past – Hume, Marx, Kant, Plato,
Kierkegaard, and the rest – and those less exalted – Erving Goffman, Erich
Auerbach, Henri Pirenne, W. E. B. DuBois, Jacqueline Jones, and many, many
more, to which list I may now be adding the name of Irving Finkel.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.